Last week the Internet greeted me with the news that Les Lye had died.  You may not know who Les Lye is, and I will admit that the name did not register when I first came upon it.  After reading the article, I was told that Les Lye was the sole adult on the hit Canadian show “You Can’t Do That on Television.” Way back when I was a youngster, Nickelodeon used to show episodes of “YCDTOTV” which I watched with great amusement.  I was too young to understand most of the jokes, but the slime was very appealing.

Friday night, I was just tooling around on YouTube and I found myself searching for episodes of YCDTOTV.  YouTube did not disappoint me — much.  They’re broken up into segments, and it seemed that a lot of the episodes were missing a segment or two.  It turns out that the website Blinkx has full episodes.  So I have a lot of catching up to do.

On Saturday, I decided to keep the nostalgia train rolling.  I discovered that Joost.com has episodes of the animated classic GI Joe!  Angie watched an episode with me, but she mostly laughed at me as I watched several more episodes while I was making dinner.  I LOVED GI Joe when I was a kid.  I cried when Duke was stabbed with that snake and went into a coma.  It was traumatic, don’t laugh.  Anyway, I don’t think I realized when I was a kid how hokey it was.  The Cheat Commandos was an over-the-top parody, according to my recollection.  It turns out that the parody is spot on.  Half of the enjoyment in watching the old GI Joe episodes is reliving the past, half is laughing at the plain goofiness of the show.

Eventually, I’ll have watched all of the episodes of these two shows that I can.  What next?  Well, I loved watching “Salute Your Shorts”, “Hey Dude” (I can still sing the entire theme song!), “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”, “Doug” (pre-Disney), and “Rugrats”.  Of course, there are toddler classics too: “Sesame Street”, “Reading Rainbow”, “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood”, and “Shining Time Station.”  Man, I miss the 80s.